Should should should

I only have two more logs/glossaries to mark before tomorrow's class--and because of a stupid meeting I am required to attend (about Shitstorm--I beg your pardon, Taskstream), I will probably miss most if not all of my time in Advisement--and even in Advisement, since business is picking up, I can't count on getting much work done when I'm there. But I think I'll have about a half hour in the morning before the meeting in which to knock off those last bits. I should, of course, have taken care of all that homework this morning before P&B, but I opted instead to noodle around with other stuff--I'm not even sure what. It felt moderately productive, whatever it was, but it had nothing to do with reading and evaluating student work.

As I've been going through the homework, however, I believe I am seeing evidence that students are relying on online study guides. So far, it doesn't look like anyone is completely bailing on the reading and relying entirely on the "help" (read "cheating"), but I do need to address the issue. I hesitate a bit, because as soon as I mention that online help is available, some who have been struggling along without it--and thereby actually doing some learning--will see that there is an easy out and will jump to that ship. But I'd rather acknowledge that the help is there and say, "If you absolutely feel you must use it, OK--though I don't much like the reliance on pre-digested food--but at least give credit for the source, so you're not flat-out cheating."

The Native American Lit class was OK today. Only five students (plus the senior observer) were in the room, but they did well enough that it wasn't a deadly experience. Mr. Enthusiastic wasn't there--again--and I'm starting to worry about whether he's going to drop off the edge here. My former student was there: he has a tendency to bring up questions or observations that have nothing really to do with the matter at hand. There may be a faint, tangential connection, but his remarks are often entirely personal, or he asks questions that are of some philosophical or social interest but don't get us into a deeper understanding of what we read. I know he does it to be engaged--and because he's genuinely seeing those kinds of connections--but he's starting to learn to put a lid on those and keep to the actual point of the discussion. I need to talk to him, though: he has simply not turned in enough work to pass--even if he were to turn in everything from now on and get all A's. I can give him a mercy D (and that would be a hell of a gift), but that's the best he can hope for at this point. He's let too many opportunities to get caught up slip past himself, and there just isn't anything to do to fix the problem. He's not going to like it, but I'd rather be honest with him now than give him the kick in the ass further down the line.

We really are getting down to the separation of the strong from the weak now. I talked to the earlier section of 102 about it yesterday: that now is when the ability to work through frustration truly is a make or break skill. Students who can't do it, who can't hang in there and keep slugging, will fall apart now, if they haven't before this point. And they're falling by the wayside left, right, and center. I hate it--and I hate that they think I'm Grendel's dam, the monster of all monsters, for being so hard on them, making it impossible for them to succeed. This is when I start seriously questioning my standards, my notorious toughness.

Bruce was even teasing me about it in P&B today: we were talking about ranking the submissions from job applicants, William wondering if he needed to give a certain number of A's, as it were--which apparently he does in his classes--and I said no: if we're talking about potential colleagues, we can't give someone a sterling rating just because he or she is the best of a crappy lot of applicants. I said that there have been times when I've been through an entire swath of applications and haven't rated anyone above a 3 (on a scale of 0 to 5)--and Bruce said, "But you never give anyone anything better than a C, either." "I give A's," I replied. "Not very often, but I give at least one every two or three years." I was joking, of course--there have been a few semesters in which no one has earned an A, but I usually get at least one A student, often more. Still, though I couldn't do what William does--it would make me tremendously uncomfortable--I do wonder if what I consider an A is just too sophisticated, not only at NCC but anywhere these days.

When I get into this concern about my standards, whether they are truly too high for undergraduate work, I consider sending out an e-mail to colleagues all over the country (maybe using the ASLE listserve), asking for samples of what they consider A-quality work at the undergraduate level. Send me samples of student writing, please; I need to compare myself against a non-community-college, non-NCC benchmark.

Actually, I'd never considered precisely that before. Hmmmm. Might be a plan. Certainly it would be interesting to see what I'd get.

Oh, blech. I could tell in P&B today that I am more cranky than I am consciously aware of being (I was pretty snappish about people missing the point of the conversation from time to time), and I don't think that's just because I didn't sleep much last night. I don't feel particularly tired today (the adrenaline effects of being wound up like a ten-day watch)--but I do think that I'm evidencing the effects of being half-way through the spring term, a time when my reserves are always running dangerously low. When that happens, my patience is generally the first casualty. (My patience is always a dicey commodity anyway: sometimes I can be infinitely patient; other times, I have absolutely no patience whatsoever.) Technically, I meet with the M/W classes 14 more times--but the semester officially ends on a Monday this year, which is idiotic, so really I'll meet with them 13 more times. And I meet with the T/Th class 13 more times: that's the official count, anyway. When I look at it that way, I realize that it's time to hold onto the safety bar and take a deep breath: the screaming downhill stretch is about to begin.

And although I don't think  there will be any screaming tonight, the downhill stretch of today is about to begin as well. Dinner, dance class, then home, to gird my loins (grid my lions) for tomorrow morning's meeting--which will require patience up the gump stump. (OK, etymology for the day: no one seems to know what a "gump stump" is. Idiots online think it came from Forrest Gump, but the expression is a hell of a lot older than that. It is perhaps a euphemism for either the ass or the vagina--but how the euphemism arise is mysterious. It is similar to saying that one has something "up the wazoo," but I had always assumed that the original "gump stump" is an actual stump of some kind, which became metaphorically linked to that idea of a body cavity of some sort. I specifically thought--based on nothing that I can reliably identify, other than my desire to make sense of the expression--that the reference was to the kind of naturally hollowed-out tree stump that fills with water and vegetation. One site theorizes that the expression is an alteration of "gum stump," as in the stump of a gum tree (the "p" added to "gum" in linguistic playfulness of the "stinky pinky" variety)--and gum trees exude a sticky sap, so I suppose that's possible. But I must reluctantly confess ignorance--and inability to find a satisfactory answer through a three-minute Google search.)